liciously ascribed to the loose practice of polygamy; and the houses
of these licentious barbarians have been supposed to contain ten wives,
and perhaps fifty children. Their disposition was rash and choleric;
they were bold in action and in speech; and as they were ignorant of the
arts of peace, they alternately indulged their passions in foreign and
domestic war. The cavalry of Armorica, the spearmen of Gwent, and the
archers of Merioneth, were equally formidable; but their poverty could
seldom procure either shields or helmets; and the inconvenient weight
would have retarded the speed and agility of their desultory operations.
One of the greatest of the English monarchs was requested to satisfy the
curiosity of a Greek emperor concerning the state of Britain; and Henry
II. could assert, from his personal experience, that Wales was inhabited
by a race of naked warriors, who encountered, without fear, the
defensive armor of their enemies.

By the revolution of Britain, the limits of science, as well as of
empire, were contracted. The dark cloud, which had been cleared by the
Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again
settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province was again
lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean. One hundred and fifty
years after the reign of Honorius, the gravest historian of the times
describes the wonders of a remote isle, whose eastern and western parts
are divided by an antique wall, the boundary of life and death, or, more
properly, of truth and fiction. The east is a fair country, inhabited
by a civilized people: the air is healthy, the waters are pure and
plentiful, and the earth yields her regular and fruitful increase. In
the west, beyond the wall, the air is infectious and mortal; the ground
is covered with serpents; and this dreary solitude is the region of
departed spirits, who are transported from the opposite shores in
substantial boats, and by living rowers. Some families of fishermen, the
subjects of the Franks, are excused from tribute, in consideration of
the mysterious office which is performed by these Charons of the ocean.
Each in his turn is summoned, at the hour of midnight, to hear the
voices, and even the names, of the ghosts: he is sensible of their
weight, and he feels himself impelled by an unknown, but irresistible
power. After this dream of fancy, we read with astonishment, that the
name of this island is _Brittia_; that it